Last Tuesday (15 January) we received a call from a law firm with an unusual announcement regarding the resignation of one of its partners. What made this strange was that it related to claims of substantive professional short-comings on the part of the individual and, like the proverbial iceberg, much of the substance of the story was carried in background briefings, leaving a only couple of anodyne on-the-record sentences that, on their own, would have left the casual reader utterly mystified.
This created a dilemma, since it was newsworthy – in the sense that it would have attracted reader interest – even if it was at heart a human interest story of little wider consequence to the wider legal market.
